Removal of FA ports from port group: online

Hello All Experts,

I have a query, on which I need your help to understand and assess the risk involved in it.

We are currently using VMAX 40K, the issue we are facing is with maxing out of the path count on the ESXi host, with the limit of 1024 Luns per host. We have couple of ESXi cluster, but the one which is the trouble maker is the Oracle-linux cluster. That cluster includes total of 9 host, they way previous engineers where handling have created multiple masking views utilizing different FA ports, due to which a single LUN is now getting visible with 8 or 16 front end paths due to which we are unable to allocate more storage to the cluster.

One of the solution advised, was to reclaim the lun, but the more reclaim we do the path count keeps on increasing, because those devices started utilizing other FA path which is now made available to them. So we are not proceeding ahead with this approach of reclaiming the LUN.

After close examining, we found that common devices are part of same SG and are made visible from diff masking views, those masking are using almost same FA ports with 2-4 diff FA ports. Few of the masking views have 1-2 diff host, though in total they make up one big cluster.

So what I wanted to understand from you is to, find the feasibility of  the approach of removal of FA ports from those different masking views which are common across those views/SG's. More importantly, can this be achieved online, or do we need to plan some downtime to remove the FA ports.

I would like to thank you all for your time and efforts in going through with the query, and sharing your point of view.

Ivan Skinner